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The USA 1919-1928

Full text of the Act designed to implement the intent of the 18th Amendment which had established the prohibition of alcoholic beverages in the USA. The Act set out what was illegal and how prohibition would be enforced.

In the years 1919-1921 the USA was convulsed by both labour radicalism and a strong authoritarian backlash from the state. Leo Robert Klein's database offers an archive of editorial cartoons and clippings that give a sense of the way the Red Scare reflected wider concerns about capitalism, class, immigration and American identity.

GMU's site is now quite old, but this section contains some sound basic context and links to some primary source material on the 'second Klan' which emerged in the aftermath of the 1915 civil war movie The Birth of a Nation'

A set of scanned documents from the second era of Klan popularity in the 1910s-20s. Built of the back of the film Birth of a Nation, the Klan became a national organisation with chapters motivated by concerns over issues race, immigration, religion and modernity. How do these sources reflect both their beliefs & fears?

Far from being limited to the Deep South, the KKK in the 1920s made inroads into many parts of the nation. This site from the Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project has photos and articles from the local Klan newspaper. Why might the KKK appeal to white communities in the Pacific Northwest?

Douglas Linder's great site has maps, documents, testimony, statements and judicial decisions that you can explore to consider how this trial reflected American attitudes to crime, radicalism, ethnicity & nationality during the 1920s.

A key piece of legislation from the 1920s signalled a final halt to the large-scale in-migration that had taken place since the late 19th century. Look at Sections 11 & 12: why do you think quotas were pinned to the 1890 population figures?

Robert Clancy a Republican congressman from Detroit states his opposition to the National Origins Act. What does this speech tell us about the dividing lines between those supporting or opposing immigration restriction?

By connecting new immigration quotas to 2% of that nationality's population in the USA as of 1890, immigration from 'undesirable countries' was severely limited. Looking at the other sources in this list, what do you think the agenda of those framing the act was?

Douglas Linder's resource provides some of the key testimony and contemporary accounts of this famous trial, ostenibly over the teaching of evolution, but also a battle over American values, modernity vs traditionalism and Clarence Darrow v William Jennings Bryan.